Methodology:
- All food will be treated as costing the target sell price. Manure and slurry are treated as being sold at the sell point because the BGA is an insane price. They could be used as fertilizer, but I don't want to get into the math for that.
- Equipment cost other than specific pig farming only items will be ignored because that cost would be incurred to sell the crop (grain production, trailers, tractors, baling equipment, etc.)
- This was done with a short (1.45 hour) and long (14.85 hour)data sets and then averaged. The data isn't quite linear and I assume that has something to do with the time acceleration while "sleeping".
- Large pig pen used in order to get reproduction rates up
- Large pig pen - $250000
- Slurry tank - $72000
- Loader, bale spike & bucket - $8240 (averaged between small and large tractor loader)
- Water trailer - $9500
- Leased livestock trailer - $5000
- 150 pigs - $225000
- Corn - $272.25
- Wheat - $117.48
- Canola - $170.29
- Sugar Beets - $8.48
- Straw - $20.25
- Pigs - $1400 (1.4 pigs per hour @ $1000)
- Manure - $55.02
- Slurry - $64.18
Hours to break even = 613 in game hours
If the player skips nights (sleeps for half the day), then it drops to 306.5 hours. Assuming the player is working 8 of the 12 remaining hours on farm stuff, the player is looking at 200 hours of game play before they can start breaking even on their initial investment. Daily profit after that is only $22331, which is basically nothing compared to other crops. A player could invest that $570K into 13 acres and come out with about $73000 in canola everyday on fast crops, $36530 on normal crops.
TL:DR livestock are not worth the money unless you like them, are playing on new farmer with pens already in place or plan on playing for a long time.